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What does Donald Trump have in common with Virginia Woolf? Nothing, you might think. But it turns out that neither is a fan of sleep. “Don’t sleep any more than you have to... there’s not enough time in the day,” Trump wrote in his book, Trump: Think Like A Billionaire. Woolf’s views on sleep were more elegantly expressed, but the sentiment is essentially the same. “Sleep,” she wrote in The Common Reader, “that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life...”

These days the Common Reader, far from deploring sleep, is pursuing insensibility by every imaginable means, from weighted blankets to sleep robots. “Tiredness,” claims Dr Guy Meadows, co-founder of the Sleep School “is the new norm”. And not...